


The Ghosts We Make

by TheSleepingKnight



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Altered Mental States, Angst, Drunkenness, F/F, Post GM, SmugBug - Freeform, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 03:15:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16824007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSleepingKnight/pseuds/TheSleepingKnight
Summary: Taylor Hebert has walked through hell and come out the other side.She left parts of her behind. She cannot find them again.





	The Ghosts We Make

_“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”― JRR Tolkien._

* * *

Learning to be ok was a process.

One that had a lot of setbacks.

Taylor was trying, though. She was.

The hospitals on Aleph were nice enough, but one could only stare at white walls so many times before it got boring. She re-learned how to walk, how to read, how to write, slowly but surely took back all the things _Contessa_ had tried to steal from her. It rankled that she had to ask for help to get to the door, it ashamed her that she had to take a breathe after going up a flight of stairs, burned that she had completely forgotten... _his_ name, but eventually she grabbed it all back and held onto it as tightly as she could.

Save…

Save _it._

She still tried when the first spider came in the room.

She still cried when it did nothing.

Lisa didn’t say anything. She knew better.

* * *

Once Taylor escaped the confines of the hospital, life improved in small stages. Snuggling on the couch with Lisa, burying herself in the scents of vanilla and lavender. Writing a coherent sentence down. Getting a drink of water all on her own. Movie nights. Reading through short stories without being confused at the words.

And sank in large ones.

Crying fits. Mind buzzing like so many flies, ghosts of half remembered memories screaming in her ears. Stumbling on the stairs and staying in bed for a week. Stuttering and slurring her words when she got stressed or overwhelmed.

Seeing Khepri, dressed in all her nightmarish glory, staring at her from the end of the room. Blood coated the armor, dripping off of pointed fingers, with no end to the rivers of crimson. Bugs snaked and writhed in her hair, and the lenses glared a furious gold.

She wouldn’t do anything. Wouldn’t say anything. Just...stared.

That was all she had to do to shatter Taylor’s composure. She didn’t want to remember that. She didn’t want to be _that_. Not anymore. She was done, she was over, and she was happy for it.

Right?

Taylor did her best to ignore Khepri. It was just her brain healing. She’d go away soon.

That’s what she kept telling herself, anyway.

* * *

Through some miracle, Taylor managed to get a job. Despite her being one-armed, the people on Earth Aleph were more than happy to hire her. Perhaps it had something to do with her fairly obvious backstory. Maybe it was the fact that Lisa was there to help her through the interviews, and she had a way of of persuading people. The job was simple, didn’t require human interaction. Paid decently well. Combined with the checks she got to help keep her on her feet as a Bet-survivor, she would be able to live comfortably.

Khepri's face burned in her retinas as she caught her reflection in the computer screen.

She was seeing her everywhere, now. Standing on the side of the street. In the window. The bathroom stall. The mirrors, everywhere. Taylor began to deliberately avoid them. Some nights, when Taylor was haunted by things she couldn’t recall, she would wake to find Khepri standing before her bed like some horrid monster come to torment her.

She never did anything. Never spoke, never moved.

She didn’t need to. Just seeing her sent Taylor right back to the battlefield, right back to the war, right back to hell. It was all she could do to keep from losing herself entirely when she saw her.

It was always worse at night. At night, the shadows seemed to be filled with fears she couldn’t place, and sleep was impossible with Khepri looming over her. She purchased melatonin pills, started taking one every night.

Didn’t work.

She upped the dosage.

Nothing.

Three seemed...unsafe.

She threw them back.

Nothing.

She turned to another tonic.

All the while, Khepri watched.

* * *

“You can’t keep doing this,” Lisa said, her spoon sitting half-forgotten against Taylor’s oatmeal, clean of food.

Taylor looked at her over the rim of the mug of coffee she was studiously attempting to drown herself in despite it being only a few degrees short of scalding hot.

She studied Lisa, trying to look thoughtful, but in truth, she was desperately grabbing at Lisa’s words, trying to push them through the quagmire that was her mind and put them back together in a sequence that made logical sense. So far, it mostly seemed like gibberish, but Taylor was pretty sure she had the gist of it. Taylor could read what Lisa was feeling in her face, in the wrinkles on her forehead, in her eyes—green! Bottle-glass green, like emeralds hidden against rock, refuge found amongst carnage—and in the gentle, sad swoop of her mouth, tugged down in a frown.

She was concerned, Taylor decided finally, and with that in mind, she rearranged the syllables into a normal, rational sentence, and hoped that the delay in response had not seemed quite so long to Lisa as it had to her.

“Doing what?” she asked, attempting to sound curious, because she wasn’t sure what Lisa meant, but it came out as a vaguely slurred, bewildered mash of partially intelligible noise.

Lisa’s right eyebrow raised, face morphing into one of dry wit and sarcasm. Taylor fought the urge to smile at the sight. It was an old, well worn face. How many times had she seen that one?

“I think you just answered my own question.”

Well that just...wasn’t computing. Taylor waited for Lisa to continue. It felt like it took an eternity for Lisa to sigh and explain. Taylor didn’t mind. She liked the color green.

“The drinking, Taylor. It’s getting out of hand.”

“Oh.” Taylor mumbled. “What’s the issue with it?”

“Well, to start, you had trouble _making_ this bowl of oatmeal. And that cup of coffee. And going to the bathroom. And-”

“Not so loud.” Taylor groaned out, wondering if she could fit her brain in the coffee mug so it could directly inhale the caffeine.

“And, well, that. It’s not healthy, Taylor.”

“I need it.” Taylor said, sipping at the coffee and finding the taste as awful as she was expecting. Good. The point of coffee was to startle you awake through sheer pain and disgust as your taste buds screamed in agony from the bitter concoction. Anyone who said otherwise was a pansy. “To sleep. Works better than the pills. Less questions too.”

“Taylor…It’s not _good_ for you. You’re gonna hurt yourself if you keep this up.”

Taylor couldn’t help but laugh at that, a sardonic smile slicing it’s way onto her mouth. “What else do I do, Lisa? What else have I ever done? I thought you knew me better than that.” She tried to take another sip of the coffee. She just stared at it instead, searching for some kind of epiphany in the muddy liquid. “In case you’ve forgotten, _I’m_ not good for me. What possibly would be?” Another morbid laugh. Everything was funny this morning, through the filter of gallows humor. “Come on. Want to-” Taylor stopped short when she saw the look on Lisa’s face. 

Green glass burned against dull brown.

“I thought I was.” Lisa said, rising from her chair. “But maybe I was wrong.”

Even through the haze of the hangover, alarm bells rang. Taylor realized what she had just implied.

“Lisa-wait, I didn’t mean to-”

Lisa was already gone.

* * *

Lisa had left, nary a note or a text to say where she had gone. Taylor didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t find a single trace of her. Taylor started drifting back to Lisa’s room, hoping to find her there but never succeeding.

She didn’t know what to do.

She was never like that before. She used to always have a plan, always have a strategy. Now? She had absolutely no idea what to do. This was all new territory.

Lisa’s room was too big and too empty without her there. Taylor took a moment to go back to her own room and gather some of her things- she really should try to get something done today.

Taylor stopped at the basin in the corner and for a moment, caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Her hair was getting long. A little too long for comfort, really. She made a face and detoured, stopping just in front of the mirror in order to examine it, tugging at strands and fussing at it with her fingers. She fluffed it in an expression of frustration, a cloud of black around her face that makes her eyes look even deeper, even older.

Then, for just for a moment, she saw it. Something that made her blood run cold, made her heart skip two beats, made her hands lash out before coherent thought has coalesced into anything functional. She doesn’t even reach for her baton, she just strikes.

Just for a moment, her reflection was Khepri.

The sound of shattering glass was deafening.

The pain followed a second too late; neurons firing as an afterthought even as she breathlessly examined her fractured reflection in the spiderwebbed surface of the broken mirror. Slowly, with an enormous effort of will, she pulled her fist back from the glass. Shards fell away from her skin and she was dimly aware that blood was beading up and dripping away from her in lines of crimson across her knuckles.

_You’re a monster._

Some part of her realized she could the water in the sink begin to pour despite her not touching it, but all her focus is on the glass. She couldn’t breathe, suffocating in memory and the sensation of blood dripping down, down into the drain. The water was turning red. She kept her gaze on her reflection’s hands, waiting for one to emerge from the surface and grab her.

_Want me to die so badly?_

The feeling of her mirror self pushing her face into the running sink, holding her until she inhaled water and chokes on it, feels so real-

_Shoot yourself and spare me the trouble._

-she doesn’t realize it _isn’t_ until her girlfriend’s voice smashes through her nightmare.

“ _Taylor!_ ”

Reality snapped back into place. Lisa grabbed her by the arm and tugged her away from the mirror, out of its line of sight. She almost heard, for a moment, Khepri shouting in rage, but Taylor crossed the edge like a magical binding, and the reflection ceased to exist.

Lisa pressed Taylor down until she sat on the edge of her bed, hands flying to her bleeding knuckles.

“Taylor, Taylor. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left- can you hear me? _Taylor!”_

Her lungs were burning. Did she really enter the water, or just forget to breath entirely? She wasn’t aware enough to tell.

“Lisa?” She said, the room shifting and blurring. She couldn’t focus on anything. She couldn’t focus on anything. Everything was blurry through either water or tears. All she could think about was sinking back into the cold and letting her thoughts and everything else swirl down the drain.

“Yes, Taylor, I’m here, I’m here-“

“Don’t leave me. Please.”

“...ok.”

* * *

She was trying to get better, she was.

Khepri appeared more often- she’d catch it out of the corner of her eye, sitting at her desk or on her couch, or standing by the window, just...watching. Never said a word. Never did anything. Never appeared to be more than the ghost it was.

She did her best to ignore it, ignore the dead void in her chest, ignore the fact that she still had that old pistol in the cabinet, ignore that everyday Lisa looked more and more concerned about her, ignore that she was more often drunk then not.

She was getting better.

She was.

It was storming, and Taylor was drinking alone.

Well, not quite. And not by choice.

“Leave me alone,” Taylor snapped, downing a shot glass as if that’ll show _it_.

Khepri simply stared at Taylor with that blank, unfeeling expression, her old mask now thoroughly inhuman.

“Disappointed in me?” Taylor giggles at the thought. She's not sure why. There's _something_ funny about it, she's sure, but she can't quite recall at the moment. “I guess I’m not the host you wanted, huh?”

She poured another, even though she knew she was being really irresponsible. She’d had...a lot. But with Khepri's dark eyes on her, she couldn’t help herself. She knocks it back.

“Just go away,” she mumbled, and she could hear the way her voice had gone slurry. “We had a good run, you and I, but it’s over now. We’re done. Nothing I ever, ever do will come close to being as important as what I did with you. I can never be that ever again. And I don’t know what do with myself. I’m trying, but...I don’t think I’m living, really. I’m just dying slowly.” Another shot, another taste of smoke. “But we’re all dying, Administrator. It’s the human condition to die. This is just...me kicking and screaming on my way to the gallows.” Taylor couldn't help but laugh at the thought. It’s so funny she started to cry, just a little.

Khepri, of course, said nothing. She never did.

Suddenly, panic gripped Taylor, overwhelming strong, too much to fight or ignore. There were knives screaming across chalkboards in her head, maddening buzzing in her veins. The rain was pounding against her skull, pounding and pounding and pounding, impossibly loud and _too much too much make it stop_ and she wanted- she needed it all to _stop._ She was suddenly certain that if she stayed in this house, she’d never escape from _this_ , from waking up tired and going to bed miserable, from the drudgery and the pain, from the ghosts that followed her every waking moment, from the _monotony_ and everything she hated about this life. She needed to get out, needed to go need to _run-_

She somehow made her way to the coat rack, grabbed her own. She wasn't sure where she was going. Perhaps she was going home. Perhaps she was going nowhere at all.

It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.

* * *

“Taylor…” Lisa says slowly, speaking to her as if she’s a live grenade. She may not be entirely wrong. “What are you doing?”

Taylor barely hears her. Her whole world has shrunk down to the delicate glass vial with the sign of omega delicately engraved on its side. The contents inside shimmered with the promise of power and freedom.

“Look what I found, Lisa. It’s a Cauldron vial.”

“Where did you find it?” Lisa asks, still speaking in that slow, measured voice.

“I went for a walk.” Taylor mumbles out, turning it this way and that way. It gleamed so prettily in the moonlight.

“Where did you go, exactly? Did you just happen to stumble onto a Cauldron base, waltz through all of the defenses, and find a vial that’s still functional?” Lisa’s tone makes it crystal clear what she’s implying.

“I…” Taylor stumbles over her words. Her head is spinning. She can’t focus on anything, her mind is full of screaming. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? Now that I have this.”

“Yes it fucking _does_ , Taylor. How do you know that it’s a Cauldron vial?”

“It _is._ Look at it.”

“Taylor, you can’t trust what you see.”

“Oh, so I’m crazy now? You’re finally going to say it?”

“Taylor, you’ve been _seeing Khepri._ Visual and auditory hallucinations, periods of regression in speech and and coordination, constant depression and low moods, they’re all symptoms of-“

“Stop talking.” Taylor snaps without any heat behind it. “I don’t want to hear it.”

Lisa looks like she’s going to cry.

“Taylor, _please._ Why don’t you trust me?”

“I do trust you, Lisa.” Taylor grips the vial harder. “It’s just that I trust me more.”

“Oh, don’t you _fucking dare_ .” Lisa snaps, face twisted in fury. “I was there for you. I helped you. I saved you a thousand times over, from capes, from people, from yourself _._ I _suffered_ for you. Even when you lost your powers, I stayed. I helped you get out of the hospital. I’ve been _here,_ helping you recover. I help pay the bills. Help you fall asleep, help you remember how to _eat_ . You _owe me,_ Taylor Hebert, and you can repay me by not drinking that.” Her face softened as she visibly reined in her anger. “Taylor, you’re not thinking clearly. For all you know, that could be some random vial you picked off the ground with god knows what. Even if it somehow really is a Cauldron vial, it could kill you.”

“Good to know.” Taylor whispered, sloshing the liquid around inside the vial. “But I know it’s real. I know it’s real.”

“Oh, really? How?”

Taylor finally looked at Lisa, locking with her eyes.

“The same way I know you’re not.”

The fight visibly went out of Lisa, shoulders sinking and stepping back.

“...oh.”

“I knew the entire time, Lisa.” Taylor’s face felt wet. She couldn’t fathom why. “I knew you weren’t real. I knew you were dead. I just...wanted to enjoy it, for a little while. Live a life with you that I never got to. But now… now I can finally go back.” She turned back to the vial. “Now I can be whole again.”

“Taylor, _please.”_ Lisa whispered. “Don’t do this. I can help you. We- we can be happy. Please don’t do this.”

“No,” Taylor said, uncorking the vial, “I don’t think I can. Not without this.”

 _“Taylor!_ ”

Taylor drinks.

Darkness flairs and gives way to silence.

Stars.


End file.
